The Confidence Seminar

About two years into my fancy corporate career, the HR department of my company invited me to participate in a confidence seminar designed specifically for women. I was instructed to read a book written by a couple of “confidence experts” and come prepared to be open about my own experiences.

I didn’t really know how to feel about the whole thing. First of all, the organizers were oddly secretive about the selection criteria, and even after we were assembled in the sterile meeting room, we couldn’t figure it out. We were all young women, but was that it? Could it be that we were all considered high potential employees?

“Maybe they noticed you don’t have any confidence,” my boyfriend helpfully suggested. Fair enough, rude boyfriend. The organizers had the best of intentions, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to them what a dick move it was to invite people to a confidence seminar and not tell them why — especially if you suspect they lack confidence to begin with.

In any case, on the day of the seminar we punctually assembled, chatting about work and eating the cheese and chocolate cake that had been set out. I begrudgingly acknowledged that, at least in that regard, the organizers knew their audience.

My plan going into the seminar was to keep a low profile, as I hadn’t actually managed to get through the book. It really wasn’t a very good book at all, and I fell asleep every time I tried to read it, exhausted as I was from the full day of actual work that I had already put in.

Just as we were about to begin, a senior leader in my department and all around Very Important Man burst into the room, all frantic apologies and ragged breathing. There were a few free seats, including one beside me, and though I’m not religious, I began to pray that he wouldn’t sit beside me. Don’t do it, don’t do it, I silently implored, careful not to make eye contact. He quickly plopped down beside me, because of course he did.

After the authors, organizers, and participants introduced themselves, the leader gave an impromptu speech. He spoke at length about the importance of displaying confidence in the business world, and said that supporting women is a cause near and dear to his heart, which is why he had offered to sponsor this event, or at least said yes when he was asked. (From what I could tell,“sponsor” meant that he contributed nothing to the event other than his presence and these unrehearsed/unsolicited remarks.)

But what remarks they were! As he spoke, this leader dug himself deep into a rhetorical hole, mentioning that he could instantly assess someone by looking at them for a few seconds. If he didn’t deem someone to be confident, this meant they weren’t competent either. He floridly expounded on the art of making snap judgments about people based on how loudly they spoke and how tall they stood.

Basically, he did a great job of inadvertently articulating everything that’s wrong in the business world: those whom society routinely imbues with a sense of confidence and a certain “I-matter-ness” are given a free pass not on the strength of their merit, but rather on the volume of their voice and decisiveness of their body language.

I was reminded of a communication session with this very leader where, at a roundtable during which he had all but ignored everyone who gave updates, suddenly snapped to attention as our comically incompetent new employee — who happened to be a white, upper class, cis man — began to speak in his trademark self-congratulatory drawl.

This particular young man had been hired after a disastrous co-op term during which each member of my team had privately voiced our concerns about our new employee to our manager. The lengths that I had seen people go to in order to give him chance after chance were staggering; I, on the other hand, could feel myself dismissed after one stumble of speech or error in judgement. At one point I was even paired off with this incompetent so I could learn from him: my communication style was too timid, I was told. In other words: people wanted to believe in a young man’s competence, whereas I was asked to prove mine at every turn. And then, after the daily beat-downs began to affect me, I got to do the work of building up my confidence in a useful seminar. At least there was free cheese.

After the leader had delivered his monologue, we got an introduction from the authors of the book — which was called The Confidence Code I think, and geared specifically towards women — in which the authors argued that the main reason that women aren’t getting ahead in the corporate world is because of a confidence deficit.

They took us through a series of exercises (worksheets! visualization!) meant to help us develop the well-rounded confidence we needed to get ahead, and shared some useful anecdotes to prove that women lack confidence.

One story involved comparing a woman who burst into tears after her ideas got rejected to a man who simply tried harder and won through persistence when his ideas got rejected. See who the better one is? The seminar never once touched upon the reasons why women might be more sensitive to having their ideas shot down.

The inevitable group work portion of the seminar came, and I was partnered off with the leader, as was my intractable destiny since the dawn of time. We were instructed to tell each other what was important to us or something, and I felt genuine gratitude to my talkative partner for taking up most of the time by talking endlessly about himself. When it came time for me to talk about myself, I earned my place in the confidence seminar by fumbling my words and speaking without confidence. He was not impressed, of course.

I tried to articulate the things that were important to me in my life, but I ended up mentioning my boyfriend and then internally freaking out because I worked with my boyfriend, and he was legally still married, and the leader was a religious man, as I had just learned, and I somehow began to feel ashamed about who I was as I gave more and more details and insight into my personal life and values. I wasn’t religious, I didn’t want children, I remembered that I didn’t have many friends either, so I ran out of things to say and trailed off…

The confidence seminar miraculously ended after the leader and I exchanged the results of our confidence quotient tests, or whatever, and decided on a few areas we could both work on. We were instructed to check in our each other’s progress in three weeks time, yet when I told my partner I’d be checking up on him, he laughed as if I had made a joke (coincidentally, he had never once laughed when I made jokes on purpose).

I left the confidence seminar feeling deflated and somehow less confident than ever. I had had an awkward exchange with a senior leader who already thought I was weird, and had gained almost no insight into how to make things easier for myself.

The whole thing may have been helpful if the organizers had given us a genuinely safe space to have a frank discussion about our strengths and weaknesses, and — this is key — the things that are out of our control that could change. But the confidence seminar didn’t really feel like it was for us at all.

Instead, I had spent the time attempting to impress a man who had spent most of the session bragging about how he makes snap judgements about people and monopolizing the conversation to explain how he is a great proponent of women’s advancement. And so once again, I found myself in a space that had no room for my voice, which was too quiet, tentative, strange, and brief for its required audience. It was exhausting.

It wasn’t exactly anyone’s fault — the organizers and authors of the book and even the senior leader all had the best of intentions, and I couldn’t point to any one culprit of my malaise, so I directed my anger back towards myself, just as I had been doing since I had first become aware of my terminal condition of womanhood.

But despite the good intentions of all involved, the message of the confidence seminar was not benign, and this is symptomatic of a society that routinely discourages women then expects them to carry the burden of their own inequality. As one Amazon reviewer puts it:

“The Confidence Code is yet another manifesto telling women what is wrong with us and how we need to “do more” and “become something” in order to be equal to men, never mind simply validated as a relevant person. A load of crap, darlings.”

Well said, mondayjane — a load of crap, indeed.

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